Want to Become a Whale? Analyzing the Top 100 Steemit Users

So you want to become a steemit whale, do you? I've decided to take a closer look at the "Top 100" members of the community – sorted by reputation – to better understand what it takes to reach the top of the charts.

To begin my analysis, I scraped data for the "Top 100" from Steem Whales. This process was simple: just copy and paste!  For reference, all data for this article was scraped on August 3, 2017.

What factors have the strong relationship with reputation?

I first wanted to understand the typical behavior of a steemit whale. If I want to become a high-reputation member of the community, how should I focus my time?

Here is a table that shows correlation between certain profile metrics and a user's reputation. Remember one of the basic rules of statistics: "Correlation doesn't prove causation." Some of these metrics don't have any impact on steemit reputation whatsoever. Some of the most valuable accounts on steemit have very average levels of reputation.

What can we learn from this table? First of all, take note that ALL of these numbers are positive. The best way to increase your reputation on steemit is to just show up and participate!

If you're looking to boost your reputation, it's easy to get carried away in the numbers, wondering if you should be spending your time following users, upvoting, commenting, etc. Instead of trying to "game the system," you can just use steemit naturally – your reputation will gradually go up over time!

As you can see, there is one factor the stands out from all the rest: Posting. If you are looking to boost your reputation, focus on creating valuable content – either by creating new posts or adding high-quality comments. If you want to make the most of your time and your goal is a high reputation, then upvoting and following users should be secondary to creating content.

What does it take to reach the "Top 100"?

Have you set a personal goal to be one of the most reputable users on steemit? If so, it's helpful to have some basic guidelines for what it takes. The chart below shows a minimum, median, and maximum value for members of the top 100 most-reputable accounts.

How should you read this chart? Consider the green column, "Minimums," to be the very bottom level if you'd like to become a steemit "power user." Odds are, if you have 860 followers and you've posted 321 times, your reputation is going to be subsantially higher than where it started. Those numbers don't happen overnight – it requires weeks or even months of work.

Want to have a shot at ranking in the Top 100 yourself? In that case, your target numbers would be in the yellow column, "Median." Most users on the list have roughly 2,498 followers, have followed 1012 accounts, and posted 3355 times. Now that takes dedication! 

Does Reputation really matter?

That's up to you! There are many great reasons to participate on the steemit community:

• Learning about new topics
• Sharing your opinions or expertise with others
• Making new friends with users that share your interests
• Supporting an emerging blockchain technology
• Just having fun!

Increasing your reputation to become a "whale" might be connected to your motivation – or it might not.

Either way, now that we've looked at some of the numbers behind the Top 100 users, we can all understand and agree on one thing: Becoming a whale takes a lot of work! (Or maybe not, steemit is actually a lot of fun.)

Thank you for reading this blog post about the Top 100 "whales" of steemit. Please consider following my account! Who knows, when we become whales, maybe it will be fun to look back and realize we followed each other back when we were just minnows? :-)